Why Movies Always Get Journalists Wrong

Reporters are either saints or creeps.

Journalists, in real life, tend to be one of the less glamorous species of humanity. The picture of a typical journalist is a man in a second-class suit with an unidentifiable stain on his shoulder looking around for a misplaced drink. That, or a woman eating salad at her desk and spilling the chopped chicken onto the floor while she tries to eat and type at the same time. The truly gifted ones, the few whom I've met anyway, I mostly remember being on the phone all the time. They are literally the worst possible people to make a film out of. And yet Hollywood can't stop doing it. Just this year there has been Jeremy Renner's Kill the Messenger and the new Jake Gyllenhaal's Nightcrawler. They show, yet again, that Hollywood can only do two types of journalists: saints or monsters. Nothing in between.

Kill the Messenger is the classic journalist-as-saint story about Gary Webb (Renner), a reporter for the San Jose Mercury News who in 1996 published a series of articles that correctly connected the CIA to drug smuggling into the United States in order to fund the anti-Communist rebels in Nicaragua. For providing this public service, Webb was absolutely crushed. His is the classic tale of the journalist who fights the powers that be to bring the story to the people so that they may know what has been done in their name—the very best of journalism, the kind that's a genuine public service and without which democracy would not function. But his story is bittersweet. The classic saintly narrative is disturbed because the profession itself turned on Webb. His story smelled too much of conspiracy theory even though it was true. Larger papers than the San Jose Mercury News found discrepancies in his work, and ultimately his editors didn't back him. He quit the paper in 1997 and was found dead, probably from suicide, in 2004.

If Kill the Messenger shows a heroic journalist being crushed for his heroism, Nightcrawler goes the other way: a scumbag journalist triumphing through scumbaggery. Gyllenhaal is perfectly creepy in his role. The amazing thing about his performance, at least to me, is how he has mastered the language of a typical freelancer. The advice he dispenses to his intern, whom he criminally underpays, just like a real intern, is the actual advice that an older freelancer would give to a younger one: take your opportunities when they come, always have more than one boss, produce for the moment. He's only a journalist by accident, because it's the perfect avenue for a criminal sociopath who preys on Los Angeles like a coyote. In fact, apparently coyotes were Gyllenhaal's major inspiration. This, too, is a well-worn type: the journalist who is willing to shed blood, his own and others, for the story.

Neither of these films is particularly original. Before Gyllenhaal in Nightcrawler, there was Jude Law with his foul teeth and utter lack of morality in Contagion, and before him there was Kirk Douglas in Ace in the Hole. Before Jeremy Renner in Kill the Messenger, there were Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman in the Oscar-winning All the President's Men. Neither type bears even the slightest relationship to reality, of course. The great journalists do not possess any particular saintliness, nor are they monstrous. They just work harder and get luckier than other people.

Why do the movies get journalism so wrong? Partly there are the simple requirements of narrative tension and drama. An accurate portrait of a journalist's life would involve a lot of afternoons eating liquorice and drinking coffee in front of a computer. Norman Mailer famously said that "Journalism is chores." And it is the ones who can endure the boredom of those chores who triumph. Take Robert Caro, a true journalistic hero who undertook absurd efforts like the below, from Chris Jones's recent profile about Caro's reporting on Lyndon Johnson:

Caro learned that a college classmate of Johnson's named Vernon Whiteside was living in a trailer in Florida, but Caro's source for that information could remember only that Whiteside was living in a town with beach in its name. He and Ina began going through Florida phone directories together, calling every trailer park in every damn Florida town with beach in its name: Boynton Beach, Daytona Beach, Fort Walton Beach.... It was Ina who made the call that found Whiteside, in Highland Beach, and she can still hear the confirmation in her ear. Caro flew to Florida unannounced — "it's harder to say no to a man's face," he says — and knocked on the door. Soon Caro found himself inside, filling notepads with scribbled secrets about Johnson's cruel collegiate rise, then returned to his hotel to type up another transcript to slip into another file to slip into another drawer.

Needless to say, this would make a terrible movie. Phone call after phone call after phone call, followed by a trip to a Florida trailer park, followed by a long boring interview, all for a detail or two. It makes for unbelievably great stories, though.

The deeper reason why the movies always get journalism wrong is that film and journalism are direct opposites. Great movies create illusions of the way we wish the world could be. Great journalism disillusions the world and shows us what we hate to see. They are brothers who are also profound enemies. It's no wonder the stronger of them needs occasionally to show the weaker one who's boss.

A Part of Hearst Digital Media
Esquire participates in various affiliate marketing programs, which means we may get paid commissions on editorially chosen products purchased through our links to retailer sites.